Rent-hike ban to protect fire victims ends despite | Real Estate news

A rule supposed to stop rent gouging in the wake of the Eaton and Palisades fires has lapsed in Los Angeles County, probably exposing some renters to hikes.

The govt order that blocked rent will increase was issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom amid the devastating wildfires last yr. Under the order, landlords couldn’t increase rents by more than 10% above their prefire ranges.

The rule, which was supposed to be momentary and was repeatedly prolonged, ended Friday after a vote to lengthen it again failed to garner enough votes. Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, whose district consists of Pacific Palisades, sounded the alarm in a movement to lengthen price protections that failed to cross at the Board of Supervisors’ May 19 assembly.

“These price gouging protections continue to be necessary as construction and rebuilding continue, and as thousands of people remain displaced,” the movement said. “Families which signed short-term leases could face drastic price increases of 50% or more without further price gouging protection.”

Los Angeles County is home to more than 1 million rental properties, though not all of them needed safety from the new rule. There are already stricter rent increase caps for many residences, relying on the placement, sort and age of the building. Despite the rent control in the area, the people of Los Angeles pay among the best rents in the nation.

It is unsure whether or not renters will face quickly rising rents now that the safety has lapsed. But some real estate specialists and policymakers said there was no need for the momentary rule that was half of the governor’s state of emergency.

Supervisors Kathryn Barger, Janice Hahn and Holly Mitchell abstained from voting on the movement to lengthen the safety, while Supervisors Hilda Solis and Horvath supported it.

“I abstained because I did not see sufficient evidence to justify extending this emergency ordinance, nor did I see evidence to eliminate it entirely,” Hahn said.

Barger’s workplace said she supported permitting the protections to sundown while ready to see whether or not new data emerged.

“Market data already shows countywide rents are only about 2% above pre-emergency levels and rental inventory has grown,” Barger consultant Helen E. Chavez Garcia said. “The Supervisor is also mindful of the burden these ongoing protections place on small property owners throughout the county.”

Mitchell didn’t immediately reply to a request for remark.

There haven’t been steep rent hikes in neighborhoods within three miles of the Palisades fire, according to a Times analysis of data from Zillow, the property itemizing company.

In ZIP Codes within three miles of the Palisades fire, rent elevated 4.8% from December 2024 to April 2025. In areas around the Eaton fire, which destroyed swaths of Altadena, rent jumped 5.2% in the same period.

In L.A. County, ZIP Codes farther from the fires noticed only about a 2% increase.

A landlords consultant, Jesus Rojas of the Apartment Owners Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, told the supervisors during public remark at the assembly that the county’s rent-gouging guidelines have “long outlived the emergency they were intended to address” and are now being “wrongfully used to harm thousands of rental housing providers throughout the county.”

“There is no proof that multifamily rental housing providers are hugely increasing rents for impacted homeowners,” Rojas said.

Indeed, there are strong indicators that the property market in the Los Angeles space has at last begun to cool.

L.A. metro-area rent costs lately fell to a four-year low, with the median rent slipping to $2,167 in December.

Meanwhile, condominium gross sales had their slowest start of the yr in a long time. Condo gross sales in Los Angeles have plummeted to a 20-year low, with fewer than 2,000 models bought in January and February — the worst start to the yr since 2005.

Newsom defended the price-gouging protections shortly after they went into impact.

“In the days following the Los Angeles firestorms, we worked quickly to protect Los Angeles survivors from any form of exploitation,” he said in February 2025. “The state has the tools in place to not only block price gouging during this emergency, but also to prosecute bad actors.”

The Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs said it obtained more than 2,000 complaints after the fires, alleging that retailers and landlords have been taking benefit of people put in hardship by their losses, and despatched out more than 2,000 cease-and-desist letters to companies and landlords for alleged price gouging, said Morine Merritt, who oversees division investigations into shopper and real estate fraud.

“Close to 90% of the complaints that we received involved allegations of rent increases,” Merritt said in an interview. Now that the fire-related protections have expired, current legal guidelines and “regular market conditions determine price increases for goods and services, including rents,” she said.

Crackdowns on fire-related rent gouging have been uncommon, said Chelsea Kirk of the activist group the Rent Brigade, which analyzed L.A. County’s rental market in the yr after the fires. It reported 18,360 potential examples of price gouging in listings but said that few lawsuits had been filed by authorities so far.

Last week, Rent Brigade announced what it said was the first personal civil lawsuit introduced by a household that claimed to be rent-gouged in the aftermath of the wildfires. Plaintiffs Randall and Candy Renick, whose Altadena home was broken, said they have been charged almost thrice the utmost permitted price for almost 10 months. They search restitution of $96,000 plus civil penalties and attorneys’ charges.

The rental market has most likely stabilized since the fires, Kirk said, but other households could still be “locked into illegal rents” that they agreed to pay when they have been in a rush to discover housing after they have been displaced.